At Town Residential, no expense is spared to make clients feel like no expense has been spared. The offices and storefronts are plush and modern, with little touches of luxury at every turn.
Visitors to the recently opened SoHo office are not just offered a drink of water, but invited to choose from the “international water bar,” which features dihydrogen oxide options from four European countries as well as the US.
The brokerage is just two years old, but has already opened eight offices and boasts a roster of more than 450 representatives and staff.
The ultra-luxury approach and rapid growth are central to the company’s business model, the brainchild of founder Andrew Heiberger. Heiberger sold his previous brokerage, Citi Habitats, in 2005 for a reported $46 million.
Town’s approach is based on the lessons Heiberger learned both from the experience of building that company and from his subsequent years at the helm of Buttonwood Development, a development firm he named for the street he grew up on.
When it comes to New York City residential brokerage, he said, it’s go big or go home.
“I’ve identified that small doesn’t work, because you need to have marketing muscle. And I also think discount brokerage doesn’t work, because you don’t attract the high-end broker, and you also don’t attract luxury real estate,” Heiberger said. “You can’t combine the word discount with luxury unless you’re an outlet mall.”
A neighborhood based-approach is also central to the company’s philosophy, which explains all those offices, each nestled in a different Manhattan neighborhood.
That’s because, according to Heiberger, about half of an office’s business is from properties within a 20-block radius of that office. What’s more, he says, Manhattan has more neighborhoods than you think. He counts 20, rather than the customary 13.
“In order to properly service this marketplace, we need to have a foothold across Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, sooner or later,” he said.
So far, Town’s approach seems to be paying off. The company claims over $1 billion in combined sales and rental transaction volume in 2012.
Offices that have been open 12 to 18 months are making a profit, according to Heiberger, and he expects the newer locations to meet that same schedule.
The firm recruits well-connected, usually experienced brokers and then gives them lots of support. Among the features of every office is a concierge service to take some of the customer service burden off the brokers. The brokers he hires are strongly connected to Manhattan, Heiberger said, and are the sort of people who like to use their office as a home base.
Crains New York Business named Town Residential one of its “Best Places to Work” in 2012. In its write-up of the company, the magazine cited the concierge service as well as the well-decorated workspaces.
Heiberger is also proud of the flexibility and growth opportunities his company offers.
“No company, before we came into the marketplace, was able to fully integrate sales, rental, and new development marketing and new development sales,” Heiberger said.
The company launched with a focus on luxury, he said, because it’s far easier to expand downmarket than to go the other way. But restricting a broker to only sales or only rentals, in Heiberger’s mind, is bad talent management.
Rental brokers all want to move into sales, he said, while sales brokers should be able to handle rentals for their established clients. “In many instances the rental and the sales market ebb and flow in different directions at different times. So instead of sitting around and taking a hiatus over the summer, for example, when sales are typically slow… during the summer you could do some rentals,” he said.
Town is owned by Heiberger and the developer Joe Sitt, of Thor Equities, who also worked with Heiberger on development projects.
They plan to open two more offices this spring, in Gramercy and Greenwich Village.
“I don’t look at this whole thing as an expansion,” Heiberger said. “I look at it as us evolving in the marketplace.”
